Plain-language rewrites: protect facts before shortening text

Last updated: 6 Oct 20265 min read

tutorial

Rewrite a technical notice for a defined audience while keeping entities, quantities, conditions and uncertainty intact.

Simplification is a controlled rewrite

A short notice is useful only if the reader reaches the same operational conclusion. “Gateway-west may fail over after 47 minutes if the replica is healthy” contains a service, a possible event, a time and a condition. Removing “may” or “if” changes the claim. First extract these meaning units and mark which must survive the rewrite. Do not use word count as a substitute for comprehension. Quantity contracts preserve the duration and its unit.

Protect identifiers and logical operators

Service IDs, ticket numbers, times, negation and exception phrases need special handling. Some can be expanded for readers, but the mapping must remain exact: “gateway-west” may be followed by a familiar display name, while the machine identifier stays available. A generated sentence can mention the same words yet reverse who performs an action. Keep a source-to-output claim map, not just a bag of required tokens. Predicate roles and negation help catch that reversal.

Choose an audience and task

An on-call engineer, a customer and an executive need different explanations. State the reader’s likely question and the action they should take. Split long sentences where dependencies remain clear, explain a necessary term once and remove details irrelevant to the specific decision. Do not erase the uncertainty that made the original notice cautious. A simplification can be longer than its source if a short jargon phrase needs explanation.

Evaluate meaning separately from ease

Ask reviewers to check factual equivalence and target readers to answer concrete questions: which service, what may happen, when and under what condition. Measure answer correctness, action errors and reading effort separately. A readability score may reward a short but false statement. Include negation, conditional phrases, numbers and unknown states in regression cases. The release lesson sets those checks; the project applies them to an incident notice.

Implementation

def protected_notice_check(rewrite, protected_values):
    missing = [value for value in protected_values if value not in rewrite]
    if missing:
        return {"state": "review", "missing": missing}
    return {"state": "needs-meaning-review"}

candidate = ("gateway-west may fail over after 47 minutes "
             "if the replica is healthy.")
facts = ["gateway-west", "may", "47 minutes", "if"]
assert protected_notice_check(candidate, facts)["state"] ==     "needs-meaning-review"
assert protected_notice_check(candidate.replace("may", "will"), facts) == {
    "state": "review", "missing": ["may"]}

Performance and operating cost

For p protected strings and n output characters, repeated substring checks cost O(pn) time in the worst case and O(p) output space. A production system can index spans, but lexical presence alone cannot prove meaning preservation; a human or claim-level verifier must inspect polarity, actors and condition scope.

Common Mistakes

Optimizing for a lower reading grade while dropping a condition.
Replacing “may” with “will.”
Changing a machine identifier without keeping the original mapping.
Treating keyword presence as proof that the claim is unchanged.